labnotes on science, culture & history

July 11, 2010

As my academic department considers how to widen our outreach to undergrads with the proposed introduction in 2011 of a major in the history of science, technology, and medicine, I've been trying to work out ways to open up connections on our campus between the world we study and students from any background. I want to downplay bureaucratic brochureware in our online presence in favor of highlighting ways that anyone can enter the conversation about the constellation of ideas, issues, events, people, and consequences that make up hsci/med/tech -- entry points that could end up in direct connections with our department, but that could also foster other, user-directed connections just as easily. In thinking this through I'm working with a web 2.0 ethic in prototyping a set of loosely joined projects with digital components: think of it as roughing in the outlines of a dept. 2.0 identity, which opens up the possibility of changed relationships among those who make a learning community a learning community.

A web 2.0 attitude entails a shift from relying on default communication norms on our dept. website that focus on presentation(of "us" faculty and the dept. we have made -- "our" degrees, "our" research, "our" teaching, "our" priorities -- with pix of students sprinkled throughout, to be sure, to show we are student-friendly) to communication norms that facilitate participation: enabling our departmental digital presence to serve as a conduit for students themselves to experiment with defining what it means to engage in "exploring science : technology : medicine : past to present" in terms of their own experiences, their own connections, and their own pathways -- whether as majors, as minors, as individuals who might take a class or two with us, or just as someone who is curious enough about the area to find us on the internet. (Previous posts in this series can be found here and here.) This digital presence would also enable engagement by students with a wide array of others, both
similar to and different than themselves, both on-campus and from beyond our hallowed prairie-ivy walls. How to start?

My primary effort has been aimed at creating an Undergraduate Portal for hsci/med/tech that will have its foothold on our department website, but will effectively be its own "start" page: a launch point for visitors to "do" things, rather than be told things. At the Undergrad Portal -- which will begin being phased in this fall, once our newly designed main website is functional -- the doing can run from obvious housekeeping matters such as finding out what next semester's classes will be or how you can declare a minor, to more expansive activities such as engaging in undergraduate humanities research (particularly by making use of digital resources -- in fact, the topic of digital hsci/med/tech research for undergrads will branch off into a companion website, hosted off the university server, because it is meant to be more than an institution-bound effort). A related, similar offshoot that I began piecing together first is "Undergrads at the Collections," which introduces possibilities for undergrad research using rotating themes, set up both as physical exhibits at OU's History of Science Collections at Bizzell Library and in a digital format via blog entries and supporting pages at the Undergrads at the Collections weblog site. The idea is that each version of the exhibit can stand alone, allowing for different forms of outreach, but that they can also be melded together, as discussed below. Our first exhibit is "The Children's Darwin," a display of children's picture books on the 19th-century naturalist, many of them published in 2009 with the peg of the celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Originof Species on which to hang their own appearance. The books are interesting artifacts for looking at how history of science is portrayed to a culture's youngest members.

The Curators of OU's History of Science Collections are genuinely welcoming of the public and all members of the university community, including students -- see their blog, for example -- but the Collections' space itself is nevertheless somewhat intimidating, what with visitors having to be buzzed in at the front doors, and with the books shelved away in stacks that need to be accessed by staff members, and with the items that are out front in the display cases being rare, fragile, and treated with reverence. On the other hand, the physical version of the Undergrad Exhibit, for which we've been allowed to homestead a small portion of the Collections' public reading room, is purposefully casual: the books aren't so valuable that they need to be housed behind glass, precisely so anyone can walk over, pick them up and literally hold them and browse through them, just as you would at your local library or bookstore. There is comfortable seating and tables that you can use to spend whatever time you'd like -- long or short -- with the books. There's an info sheet describing the exhibit, along with a discussion of how this kind of topic lends itself to research questions that connect up with real world issues, and suggests how the topic -- and offshoots from it -- offers useful starting points for user-generated content, if you will.

By adding a digital version of the exhibit, we can multiply its presence in several ways: by providing the ability for users to offer comments at the blog (our goal is to have an available laptop with the books so that visitors can add comments then and there via wifi) -- comments that live on the open web as contributions that make them more than a mere academic exercise (as with a typical class assignment one turns in to the instructor). Being on the open web, comments and queries from others anywhere at all with an interest in the topic or approach can also weigh in, adding to the interactive possibilities; and a digital version can also help to give members of the general
public the same
opportunity as the students to see what historical research can look like, demystified -- and
comment themselves, if they'd like, and join the conversation, or use it
to think with for their own purposes. Digitizing the exhibit also allows us to provide further links to research resources appropriate for undergrads or others interested in starting out on exploring the topic; and with digital versions, each successive exhibit can be layered on to the previous ones in an incremental fashion, creating a multi-dimensional archive that highlights the possibilities of humanities research by students, available to anyone brainstorming instructional projects.

This first display -- "The Children's Darwin" -- along with the next one or two Undergrad Exhibits, are occurring during what might be called the "silent phase" of our "academic department as web 2.0 campaign" -- rather like the early non-publicized period in a fundraising effort that quietly solicits donations so that the goals are already half-way met by the time that the endowment campaign is formally announced to the public. We hope to build up awareness bit by bit as we prototype, display, refine, and improvise on our way to providing working examples of how an interactive presence with undergrads and others can work -- so that when our department gets its window of greater visibility that will come with rolling out the major in a year or so we can already be experimenting in interactive terms, offering participatory possibilities in many forms, rethinking the variability and lability of what "open courseware" can be when the faculty, students, and members of the public create it together.

In dedicating a physical space specifically for undergrads at the Collections -- which is our department's "humanities laboratory" -- we want to literally demonstrate that, yes, you belong here; in choosing books that can be placed out for handling and interactive use, that are meant as starting points that can tell multiple stories simultaneously, depending on the individual pathways one chooses, we want to emphasize that humanities are for everybody; and by offering examples of research topics that demonstrate you don't have to be a faculty member to do history, we hope to make our discipline, and our research home itself, less intimidating to students, creating a space that facilitates the use of all kinds of media as social media. We often have our students visit the Collections and bring out treasures to show them, and some of us have even devised exercises that allow our students to use Collections' volumes as part of our class projects. But it is very rare that students come back on their own, or feel confident that they truly can be part of the research community, no matter how heartily we invite them to do so. Thinking in web 2.0 terms can change this, because our invitations will be more believable, visualizable, and doable, for students from any major. There's no reason not to think that in the near future we can have
undergrads curating their own exhibits, sending their own queries and
examples out onto the web, cultivating conversations among a diverse
array of participants, and being members of a shape-shifting collective that helps us think of history as public history, belonging to all.

So that's some of the rationale as to the "why" of our Undergrad Exhibits prototype, "The Children's Darwin." There'll be a new exhibit for Fall 2010, so more on that to come; but how about the "what" of "The Children's Darwin" itself? You didn't think I could leave that topic before making an observation or two of my own, did you? That's coming!

May 28, 2010

I'll admit, as a slogan, "hacking the academy one department website at a time!" doesn't have great prospects as a rallying cry. Websites for academic departments are typically one of the most uninspiring formats that exist on the internet: the components are pretty standardized, from the digitized brochure boilerplate, to the perfunctory faculty listings, cursory course descriptions reproduced from the university catalog, and occasionally some newsletter-type info bites. Visit a sample of departmental homepages and it would be hard to guess that there's a whole world wild web of 2.0 functionalities out there . . .

I've just begun a series of posts on how I've been trying to reconceptualize communication with our department's undergrads under the stimulus of web 2.0 capabilities, using our departmental pages as our jumping-off point. This has caused some head-scratching -- not least because getting our basic revised departmental website up and running has been a nightmare, as in I'm still waiting waiting waiting w a i t i n g on that, so doesn't that prove the folly of trying anything new digital-wise with such a bureaucratic form? A compelling point! -- but mainly because everyone knows that, really, in all honesty, hardly anybody visits a departmental website, and especiallynot undergrads. Since the departmental website is like a digital deadzone, better to put one's ingenuity into online classroom technology or one's own blog or debating, developing, and divining what the latest techno-cool tools are with others who share an early adopter mindset.

But it's deceptive: even though departmental websites seem to be buried deep inside the layers of a university website's architecture and therefore exist way off the grid in a grayish netherworld, they're not, of course. They live on the open web by virtue of a url just like any other website. And if we can experiment with reconfiguring the lines of communication and participation with our undergrads via a departmental website rethought in 2.0 terms, there's no reason not to extend that line of thinking one step further: to the departmental website as a crossroads between professionals and the public, reconstituting what professional and public means in the process.

Bringing dynamic elements into a departmental website can be as simple as starting with an rss feed or two that brings the outside world across the university's walls and into the heart of where a community of researchers currently (digitally) resides: at the department's website. If the rss feed speaks in everyday language rather than in a specialized vocabulary, then an interesting juxtaposition is struck immediately in and of itself, as with, say, a science news feed on a science department's site. By its presence, the feed instantiates an ongoing invitation for responses by members of the departmental community to speak to current events, and/or a challenge to individuals to adopt the common tongue in a like manner in communicating via the website about what goes on in research and teaching, and/or a prompt to take an item and use it as focal point to link to other resources that are available to anyone near or far who may find them of use and who come across them via the website.

And it's a relatively simple matter to make that happen, by adding in a blog component that professors can post to that has a comment function and the ability to share posts across multiple social networks -- and if so, the departmental website begins to rejuvenate from the deadzone and the departmental community begins to live out on the open web together, where it is much more likely that interaction with various publics can happen than if professors remain walled in, physically or digitally. [And if it seems to hard to revamp the website, a companion space can be activated via typepad or wordpress, for example.]

And, of course, there is so much that can be done, once you get going and improvisation proves not only possible but the way to move forward and evolve.

The aspect of this that I especially like is how decentralized the department as a local node is in representing a discipline, and how it doesn't depend on a scholarly society representing you or me, but you or me representing what our disciplines do, in concrete terms that communicate in the vernacular, allowing for encounters that recast the circulation of knowledge in different terms than how we normally perform when we hew to the various reward structures of our disciplines (as structured by journal editors, and funding agencies, and an institution's administrators). In being located at the departmental level, it makes it easier to bring in those who have been uninterested in computer-mediated communication -- folks who, perhaps, even have disdain for those who know about the specific bells and whistles that exist in the sphere of social media -- and allow for broader participation within our own local sphere, and thus a greater diversity of voices, and a more robust set of dynamics. It also makes communication and interaction with the public not something that is the "job" of a few hardy/gregarious/adventurous individuals, and instead the responsibility of a collectivity.

In my field of History, historian David Thelen (in The Presence of the Past) challenged his colleagues with the following argument about the cramping of the scholarly mind that can come with professionalization:

"the greatest danger from
professionalization – a danger that is great because it is often
invisible –
is that its self-enclosing thrust has made it harder for us
professionals to
recognize which of our practices resemble ‘common,’ ‘local,’ or
‘everyday’
knowledge and perspective and which have evolved into jargon that
makes
sense only to other professionals. If we wish to construct serious
dialogues
about the past with nonprofessionals – who are, after all, our
fellow
citizens and human beings – we may need to go back and revalue our
first
languages, the ones we were taught to leave behind when we entered
the
professional world. By recognizing patterns in our historymaking
practices
that we share with others, we can more effectively contribute to the
larger
historical culture we all inhabit."

I believe that, increasingly, how connections will be forged among others outside our professional circles will be mediated by an ability to speak in the "digital vernacular" of web 2.0. By finding meaningful ways to participate in the digital vernacular, we can "more effectively
contribute to the larger culture we all inhabit." Using the departmental website -- which is a ready-made representation of our authority as academics -- and drawing on the practices and philosophy of web 2.0, opens up our world to others, and becomes a space in which we can communicate in new ways and interact in unscripted encounters that can allow us to rethink our pedagogical imperatives and traditions.

By entering into the stream of inquiry when it is constituted by small
pieces loosely joined -- and by thinking of the internet's capabilities
in interactive and participatory terms with the public as potential
partners, rather than as an audience who views a static digital display space in which we set
out products -- we take on more modest roles as academics, with the
potential to hack new forms of community that change ourselves as well
as offer possibilities to others.

So, the departmental website as an online learning environment? I know, perhaps a difficult concept to credit. But I bet there are already innovative examples out there that currently exist, ready for us to play with. I'll be looking.

May 13, 2010

Our department is in the middle of big changes -- several years of recalibrating the classes we offer and reconfiguring our course structure, finishing up a proposal during the last year for an undergraduate major in the history of science, technology, and medicine to send to the Regents for approval, and an overhaul of our website in which we've encountered one nerve-wracking stumbling block after another for three years (and we're still waiting!) -- all of which entail questions about how best to do outreach to undergrads from the departmental level.

Of course, how best to do outreach depends foremost on what your goals are. The default position is that the goal of outreach is to fill up classes (a bottom line administrative imperative that has become ever more critical as we experience the effects of the Great Recession). How enrollment happens tends to be attributed to an inscrutable amalgam among undergrads of word-of-mouth, conventional wisdom about career paths & relevant coursework drawn from personal networks, the passing along of local lore about departments and classes, the effect of teaching evaluations, and institutional cultural quirks that have a stunningly inertial status, accompanied by, from the other end, individual instructors or departments trying to influence enrollment by the archaic strategy of . . . posting flyers (which now seek out the fickle student eye with colored text and images, however, as opposed to the monochromatic versions of the pre-inkjet era!) or announcements on a department website. Although announcements on the department website recognize that a new communication source exists -- the internet -- most students don't visit department websites. So, broadcasting at -- never mind communicating with -- undergrads along these lines is clunky, at best, and irrelevant at worst.

In chairing the Undergrad Program Committee over the last few years part of my job is to tend to such matters, but -- if the stars align properly -- the track we're on to add a major to our department's portfolio (we currently administer a graduate program and an undergraduate minor) has made me think differently about not just the methods but the goals of undergraduate communication. To be sure, we've worked at making the conventional methods more robust -- for example, I designed an online survey for undergrads that touched on lots of different aspects of our proposed major, our current minor and courses, but also asked some basic questions about traditional and online forms of communication, for example, to see where things stood.

Our newer set of tools includes a facebook group page since the social networking site is popular with our students, and I've been encouraging the posting of relevant departmental announcements by faculty on their CMS class pages as well as utilizing an email list we've cobbled together (our institution can't provide us with accurate and timely information on who has taken more than one class in our department, for example, or who is pursuing a minor -- we have to capture this info on the fly as best we can). So, we've made steps forward that target outreach a touch more effectively accompanied by a toe-in-the-water in terms of social media. . .

. . . Except, these aren't steps that really open up shifts in the communication ecology. For that, the issue isn't how to take our one-to-many broadcast methods and make them louder, but to think in terms of what the emergence of web 2.0 offers (think facebook, blogs, flickr, youtube, social bookmarking, wikipedia for starters): many-to-many, interactive, participatory, and collaborative forms of communication. The point isn't the tools themselves (or their sparkly newness) -- let's twitter because it's trendy! -- but the fact that tools exist that make it possible to consider new goals, to think about communication differently, and therefore to imagine changed relationships: of students as partners, not simply as audiences. What I'm after is not just a discussion of what can happen in the classroom, but at a different location: at the digital interface at which the departmental presence and an individual's attention can meet in ways that enhance the possibilities of mutual engagement, conversation, and innovative improvisations among networks of people that didn't exist before. Not new methods in and of themselves -- instead, new goals, therefore new methods.

But is this reflective exercise even realistic? Or necessary? Or desirable? Academic departments aren't especially good at digital experimentation, and here in our department, like so many, we're under-resourced as it is in terms of money, support, and expertise on campus in regard to the majority of our organizational tasks, let alone computer-mediated communication -- and most faculty consider anything web-related to be synonymous with blackholes. Is there really a compelling interest to be served in screwing around with the current model of departmental webpages as print brochures that have migrated online? Given limited amounts of support and time, isn't thinking of departmental outreach in web 2.0 terms something that's a luxury reserved for those with resources to spare, not for those who live in economies of scarcity?

Over a year or so I've worked through the issues that this proposition presents in as many different ways as I know how, and have come to the conclusion, that, yes, it is necessary to think differently about undergrad communication. I think the departmental-website-as-pixellated-brochure concedes too much to tired ways of thinking about teaching, about research, and about the place of the humanities in the public sphere. That's a lot to pin on a mere departmental website, as opposed to focusing on the more dynamic space of individual professors' classrooms, for example. But how institutions present themselves matters. As the authors of the cluetrain manifesto argued in 1999, in theses 15, 34, and 35:

In just a few more years, the current
homogenized "voice" of
business — the sound of mission statements and
brochures — will seem as contrived and artificial as the
language of the 18th century French court.

To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of
their communities.

But first, they must belong to a community.

This is even more clearly the case in a web 2.0 sort of world. What would happen if we thought anew about the departmental website, re-imagining it as a newcomer's portal, an open learning environment in and of itself whether or not you are even enrolled in one of our classes? That's what I'm going to walk through in the next few blog entries, as I try and reorient myself to the mix of new threads that I've been working on piece by piece in trying to weave new patterns in our local webworld. (Yes, I'm back digitally, and doubling-down on the bet rather than leaving the table.)

(Know of good examples? I'd love to learn more about what others are trying -- links would be great to have!)

June 19, 2008

1953: Midnight Fireball Hits Bay -- UFO Near Miss???? No, the image isn't a real historic boardwalk handbill from Antiques Roadshow but one more bit of McMilleniana (as are the ones below and to the right) -- they're actually banners made in 2004 for the Santa Monica Pier in California for a public art project that took its inspiration from "the facts, folklore, myths, and legends of the Pier's early history," with the images "representing historical events that may -- or may not-- have actually occurred." McMillen's banners, along with those of artist Steve Galloway, were printed on vinyl and hung out on light poles on the boardwalk, flickering in and out of view of visitors as they strolled along the Pier entertaining themselves. (There are more than two dozen, and each one of them is really fun and clever... very much in keeping with a characterization that McMillen used in another context about an art project of his: "all part of an open-ended narrative, a carnival for the curious.")

My third take-away lesson from the world of art for myself as an historian of science (there is a first one -- "trying to make the (seemingly) ephemeral visible". . . and a second one -- "of crocodelephants and category confusions") as seen through the envisionings of Los Angeles artists Sam Rodia and Michael C. McMillen is related to the idea of artistic installations: art in the wild, out in the public square. McMillen's banners for the Pier are an exuberant wave of the hand, inviting those who encounter them to take them in -- maybe do a double-take -- and respond as might be, maybe with amusement or bemusement, or in sparking off a train-of-associations, or drifting in and out of a game of detecting how close to historical reality the "commemorative" homages are.

The artist initiates a conversation, drawing on the representations and forms and idioms of everyday life, and provides an opportunity for engagement in a way that brings the specialist or expert (the artist) into an inviting -- if brief -- relationship with ordinary folk, casual passers-by. The Pier's visitors didn't have to possess the right connections to enter the home of a wealthy collector who owns an artpiece only seen by invitation, or even to venture into a museum gallery that is the art world's home turf: here, installation art, as public art in its most open form, takes up residence within a commonplace that offers the possibility for an interplay between "experts" and "laity" in a way that neither condescends nor intimidates. The third lesson, then, is of how venturing out beyond professional confines has so much potential: of teaching ourselves as we improvise new forms of communication, in ways that offer different kinds of connections and opportunities for imagination and reflection. And that's why I'm here on the web, diving into the area of science and popular culture, trying to figure out how to be a digital historian of science: putting out a few banners to fly in the public square. Its time to learn how to do history of science in the wild, not simply caretake it within the neatly trimmed hedges and rows of academic propriety.

McMillen's banners are also a wonderful nudge in and of themselves to speculate about the flotsam and jetsam of science and popular culture. UFOS streaking down into the sea, giant squid breaking the surface and upending an unwary boater, late-Victorian submarine steamers illuminating the murky depths: they're all wonderful evocations of the idea of mysteries that lurk so often at the heart of popular culture phenomena, with the ocean being a particularly apt emblematic prompt. In fact these three "historical" posters offer more than just apt symbolic representations of recurring popular symbols -- they intersect with real artifacts as well, in which connecting the dots begins to reveal possible patterns of culture. If not a real-world UFO sighting, well there was the 1953 movie, Phantom from Space ("Million Monkey Theater" provides a sharp narrative and commentary) in which an alien being crashes into the ocean off of Santa Monica. Jules Verne, in the 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, gives us both a Victorian submersible and a giant squid, featured as well in the 1954 film by Disney. Off the coast of Santa Monica you can spy Catalina Island twenty-seven miles away, where (as the locals tell it) the glass-bottom boat was invented in the late-19th century to take advantage of the clear waters and abundant sealife as a novel tourist attraction-- not quite the gothic hulk of McMillen's imagining, but in 1906 you could experience a variant of the Vernian aquatic dreamscape by touring Catalina's "undersea gardens" via glass-bottom boat. Of course, Catalina being a tinsel-town playground, the tourist craft gets its own star treatment in the Doris Day movie from 1966, The Glass Bottom Boat (with Day as a NASA employee and occasional mermaid...there are interesting images of scientists to consider in this comic film). With just this brief tour, we've probably discovered at least a couple of relevant items worthy of study that are historical obscurities for most by now.

It's unlikely that a rampaging squid actually tormented a bay-dweller in 1949 as recorded on the second banner, but Hollywood, just down the road, producedThe Lady Takes a Sailor that year with Jane Wyman (directed by Michael Curtiz) where an octopus apparently figures into the narrative, although it's an underwater vehicle that breaks the surface and upends her sailboat -- and, interestingly, just two years post-Roswell, the plot features a government cover-up of secret experiments (extending to messing with civilians' heads and reputations) involving a submarine tractor (bringing together, in a loose but ever more thickly woven web, echoes of ufology, troublesome cephalopods, and novel deepsea machines :-) Of course, nasty squids/octopi received iconic treatment at the movies during the cold war period in Disney's 20,000 Leagues and It Came from Beneath the Sea("it" being a six-armed octopus that attacked San Francisco, courtesy of Ray Harryhausen) from 1955 and in the 1961 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, directed by Irwin Allen (I actually saw one of these as a kid -- I think the third one -- at Catalina's movie theater at the Avalon Casino, after having had my first tour in a glass-bottom boat. . . I can still see the vague form of a giant octopus in my mind's-eye today, it scared me that much!). Of course, giant squid are among the most durable popular culture themes and are still a big draw, being that they're so elusive -- they were only recently caught live on video in 2005.

A fascinating late-19th century California seaside connection is a science fiction short story that appeared in a periodical called The Californian in December of 1893. Entitled "A Submarine Christmas" [via Google Books], the fantastic tale by Thomas R. Caldwell shamelessly draws from Verne, but is a surprisingly fresh and up-to-date look for its time at marine zoology. The plot involves an inventor of a submarine research vessel who travels to Avalon Bay at Catalina Island to test it out, and of his intrepid friend from the East Coast who joins him for assorted undersea adventures, including a near-fatal encounter with a "giant cuttle-fish (Architeuthis), a monster at least seventy feet in length. . . Its arms were thrown about the boat: its uncanny black eyes glowing like huge plates in the glare of the search lights" (accompanied by an excellent illustration). Fortunately for the harried explorers, it was all a dream! But the 1906 piscatorial machine of the Santa Monica Pier banner would look remarkably apt as an illustration for the 1893 story; certainly Thomas R. Caldwell would have felt right at home! And, again, we've probably discovered at least a couple of relevant items here that are historical obscurities for most by now, simply by using the 2004 banner imaginings by McMillen as jumping-off points.

Making the (seemingly) ephemeral visible is part of what the art world can teach us humanists, and artists can also inspire ideas about how to visualize a carnival for the curious -- experimenting outside the petri dish -- needed, especially, when humanism becomes tinged with scientism. Not only that, but they can send us off into cultural scavenger hunts that turn flotsam and jetsam into useful things to think with and that point toward historical work that needs doing.

May 30, 2008

So how can you make something that is as wide as a (modest) household lot and as high as 100 feet and has the heft of hundreds (thousands?) of cubic yards of steel and cement invisible? As I wrote last time, in what it seems now was the first installment of lessons for science and popular culture from art, it's a very simple sleight of hand: leave it unclassified. As Calvin Trillin remarked in the New Yorker in 1965 about what came to be known as Sam Rodia's Watts Towers in south-central Los Angeles, "If a man who has not labelled himself an artist happens to produce a work of art, he is likely to cause a lot of confusion and inconvenience." The problem in classification had been created through the decades-long labor of an Italian immigrant who, the correspondent from NYC explained, "constructed a dream-like complex of openwork towers . . . and encrusted them with a sparkling mosaic, composed mainly of what had once been refuse." A book without a Library of Congress call number can't be shelved, and may as well not exist -- you won't find it in the art section. Of course, even if forced by circumstances to classify something that is confusing and inconvenient and made out of refuse, we can assign it to a category that still renders it hard to see: say, label it as popular culture, not Art. In the part of the scholarly map where I work, the stuff that relates to science but that isn't produced by a scientist also creates category problems: if it's stuck in the ephemeral -- the category of "popular culture" -- it is hard for professional historians of science to see it (or to take it seriously). If it's not scientist-produced and approved -- and therefore solid and visible -- then why would a historian of science study it? Another category problem.

About a decade after I'd seen the Watts Towers, I received another lesson in art, from another Los Angeles artist who makes particular use of the discarded junk of modern society in creating his sculptures and installations, Michael C. McMillen (that's one of his pieces at the top -- "The Box of All Knowledge," from 1997 -- which, by the way, can't be opened. So what is in it???) To the left is one of his recycled pieces on the cover of "Folksongs for a Nuclear Village," a Shadowfax album -- the piece's title translates as "In the Middle of Our Life's Journey," a line taken from the opening of The Divine Comedy. As a post-Sputnik youngster McMillen was very involved with tinkering and with science -- reading Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, working in a homemade chemistry lab behind his grandfather's workshop -- and he majored in science in college before switching to art his sophomore year (for this and more, see an interview from 2002 titled "The Alchemy of Things"). His artworks often reference technology and science and history. In capturing the nature of his work from this time period Elenore Welles suggested that:

Fifteen years' experience building models for Hollywood movies [such as Blade Runner] and an abiding love of craftsmanship is visible in the amount of technical finesse applied to these intricate constructions. McMillen's passion for junk is evidenced in the huge stockpile in his backyard. Items such as plumbing valves, door hinges or typewriter keys provide impetus for his conceptual fecundity. He likes his process to be ongoing and interactive. In fact, works often appear to be in an evolving state. The viewer is brought into the process of invention and discovery.

McMillen juxtaposes objects to evoke associations and to investigate the fine line between illusion and fiction. The transmutation of matter, how it disintegrates and is reborn, inspires his art. Scientific logic and the nature of matter are terrains that often remain obscure. But he attempts to demythologize them. In the process of building his imagery he plays with the psychology of perception and the ideas those images might convey.

As someone who was set to return to graduate school (not to study cognitive psychology, like before, but history of science instead) I loved visiting his installations and gallery shows, which through the richness of the juxtapositions and layerings and their surprises and resonances raised all kinds of interesting questions about the meaning of science and technology as past and present for me. The artworks were always the effort of one mind seeking to convey ideas and emotions to other minds, but without dictating results, leaving room for viewers to discover and interpret and reimagine. McMillen's installations were partnerships with his visitors, sometimes literally, as when their actions became part of the exhibit themselves. He once remarked that he "wants viewers to interpret his art according to their own experiences. . . 'I suggest, rather than shout.'" (from Patricia Hamilton, Michael C. McMillen: Hermetic Landscapes, 1988).

Suggesting, rather than shouting. . . this was part of what I loved about these carefully constructed worlds of McMillen's and why they seemed so engaging to me. And here's this second lesson I learned, although it has caused me no end of uneasiness in becoming an academic historian of science. Our disciplinary rhetoric, our blunt-edged forms of persuasion such as the scholarly monograph and the professional article, are built on an argumentative platform that seeks to marshal evidence and drive home a thesis, in order to engage almost in a battle with the minds of readers to convince them that they must understand what we are writing about in just this one way. Especially within the history of science, which frequently seeks to emulate the sciences themselves, our histories often proceed as if they were clever, neatly contained scientific experiments, in which we deploy independent variables to find out if our hypothesis is judged to prevail or not. This professional mode was coming up against a set of changing dynamics, however -- something that cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed in 1983: that a "blurring of genres" was occurring within intellectual life, with "many social scientists hav[ing] turned away from a laws and instances ideal of explanation toward a cases and interpretations one, looking less for the sort of thing that connects planets and pendulums and more for the sort that connects chrysanthemums and swords." He characterized this shift as a contemporary "refiguration of social thought," summing it up in this way: "something is happening to the way we think about the way we think." I could see this shift all around me, as with McMillen's installations. But Geertz's shift didn't seem all that real when dealing with the print culture of academia in which I was being trained for.

So, what I wondered from what artists such as McMillen had taught me is this: what does the rhetoric look like for less martial, less adversarial histories of science? Why not histories of science that insteadview the reader as a partner in meaning-making, that strive to evoke, and broaden, and recalibrate, and suggest, and raise possibilities rather than seek to have the last word (reject the null hypothesis)? What category would this kind of history of science fall into, this kind of art-inflected narrative, one based on picking up the flotsam and jetsam discarded by the mainstream, reworking it, reconsidering it, recategorizing it, blurring genres?

I left California in 1994 for Oklahoma, and haven't been able to followMcMillen's work in person, although the web makes possible a bit of visiting at several removes. And it's a delight to see that among the numerous and fascinating turnings he's taken that he's found unusual ways to bring his reflections on humans and history and science and technology to new and different locations: whether just this last year at the San Jose Museum of Art, for their group exhibition on "Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon". . . or CalTech, with "Dr. Crump's Inductive Geo-Imaging Mobile Laboratory (Field Unit 1)", where visitors would see an "ever-evolving archive of artifacts" from the research being conducted of, he revealed, a series of buried chambers from an underground abandoned laboratory, sealed off over seventy years before. . .or Geologica 42, at the LA Metro Fillmore station . . . or the joint experiment by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Naturalis (the Netherlands' national Natural History Museum in Leiden) that he and a handful of other artists participated in, "Conversations: Nature and the City," featuring his Crocodelephant Incognitus Giganticus and the "The Flying Dutchman" (the porpoise skeletons with schooner sails above to the right). When the exhibit set up in Leiden a real scientist came by to look over the artists' pieces and deliver a prouncement: Philip Campbell, an astrophysicist and editor-in-chief of Nature (his review, "Conceits and Provocations: Artists Reveal a Variety of Responses to the Contents of a Natural-History Museum," appeared in the 16 November 2006 issue, p. 274). His final conclusion about artists in a museum context is that: "Cumbersome attempts by artists to pose philosophical questions in a visual form tend to smack of conceit, rather than stimulate," although he allows that the closer that the artists get to "artfulness" -- which he defines as "sheer visual creativity" -- the better they do. I wish an historian of science had also reviewed the exhibition, to see what further conversations might have resulted!

Campbell finds McMillen coming off somewhat better in his mind than did some of the others, giving him an evaluation of being "conceptually more substantive" and displaying a "sense of visual play that adds to the cultural value of the specimens." He also seems to endorse the statement in the organizers' supplementary material that "McMillen's creativity is closer to the way our brains work than we might want to admit." McMillen himself speaks of his Naturalis creations, which play off of nature's creations, as "all part of an open-ended narrative, a carnival for the curious." Perhaps this is what leads "print" historians like me (who spend too much time haunting artists' venues?) to venture out into the digital world -- searching for a contemporary space that allows room to mount a carnival for the curious with open-ended narratives allowed, even necessary. Ephemeral? It depends on what categories we navigate by . . .

For more: McMillen's most well-known Los Angeles installation is the fascinating "Central Meridian" (and here) which is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. If you're ever visiting LA don't miss it (or the Watts Towers)! You can also see a quick YouTube hit of a recent installation at Cincinnati's UnMuseum, Speed's Place. For more background on the artist, see this oral history interview that the Smithsonian Institution conducted with McMillen in 1997. Clifford Geertz's essay, "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought" is from his Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology; the essay was first published in 1980 in American Scholar.

March 07, 2007

As an historian of science, I've spent a lot of time observing the moon -- at least observing the historical traces of where the moon's path has intersected with the human quest to understand nature, the universe, and the meaning of (scientific) life. I've actually never seen the moon through a telescope, as so many scientific investigators have, down through the years since the time of Galileo (that's his work to the left: one of his drawings of his telescopic moon from the Sidereus Nuncius -- The Starry Messenger -- of 1610). Like a lot of moderns, I know the moon from the occasional naked eye glance up to the heavens when I'm out and about and the night is clear, or from the NASA photographs that became part of the collective consciousness for those of us growing up in the sixties.

I'd always liked the idea of star-gazing through a telescope, but growing up in a working-class family, the likelihood of owning a telescope was out of the realm of what was possible. When I became older and on my own, such a thing still seemed like an extravagance, and, really, weren't all those professional pictures in magazines and embedded within television science documentaries going to be vastly better than anything I could manage on my own with a telescope, rendering my own possible efforts redundant? Still, I always had a small, nagging feeling that I was missing out on something important that existed outside of a world of daily routines that kept my focus earth-bound, with little time to just sit back and scan the sky. (I'd heard that binoculars had come down in price and up in power in a way that allowed one to view the moon as Galileo had, but I never got around to investigating that in more detail -- if there had been the kind of web we have today to plug into in the 1970s or early eighties I would have found a lot of advice in seconds and it might have seemed do-able. Take a look here or here or here, for example. Or, if I had encountered the evangelism of sidewalk astronomy, who knows?)

So most of my moon-gazing these days takes place within the pages of books -- the History of Science Collections here at the University of Oklahoma has an astonishing collection of rare books, and I've had the opportunity to pore over the original copy of that Sidereus Nuncius pictured above more than a dozen times in the course of teaching students, and we'll be pulling some other Renaissance rarities this week in another visit for the science and popular culture class, to accompany our reading of Scott Montgomery's The Moon and the Western Imagination. If you want a sense of what we'll be up to, take a look at this wonderful online exhibition from the Linda Hall Library, The Face of the Moon: From Galileo to Apollo.

But before getting strapped into the way-back machine during our Collections visit, I thought I would take a tour around the web and see what might turn up, striking off on a trail that starts from Montgomery's book, but then which rapidly branched off to other strange and fascinating links:

And examples of "good moons rising" (and bad ones) from children's picture books -- see how the classic story, Good Night, Moon does a superlative job of portraying the moon through the window as you page through it. This is from a site with an inventive educational twist that is absorbing in itself: Paper Plate Education, whose motto is "Serving the universe on a paper plate." What a concept!

For more: Here's a collection of paragraphs from an assignment I gave where each member of the class spent some time looking at the night sky and reported back what thoughts occurred to them: funny, lyrical, profound stuff. And here's a previous blog post that touches on the idea of the Apollo landing being a hoax and discusses the myths about the Challenger explosion.

February 12, 2006

As we were discussing the possible reasons for the wild success of March of the Penguins, one student noted that, whatever else might be true, it was hard to escape the fact that penguins were just pretty darn popular on their own – in fact a number of students mentioned that they never miss the penguin exhibit at the zoo, and some even made sure it was their first stop. This surprised me, because I’d obviously missed out on the fact that penguins are a kind of glamour species, just like dolphins, or orcas, or elephants, or wolves. But once the students pointed it out I’ve begun seeing them everywhere (certainly the Madagascar penguins are a big hit with my pre-schooler who I think secretly wants to be the Skipper). If you want to see some now, you can, thanks to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Live Penguin Cam. But my sharp-eyed students pelted me with one penguin pop icon after another, including, of course for the web savvy, the Linux penguin. Want to see 16 pages of penguins courtesy of lwn.net, a linux news site? Sure you do.

The Linux penguin got me thinking about the vogue for silly, whimsical, cute and cuddly logos for information technology firms. An overfed penguin is an obvious kind of "hey, we’re just a bunch of fun guys having a fun time" kind of image (no intimidating geometric holograms for us!). With Yahoo! you’ve got the name itself and the cereal-box typeface (and the hip counter-hip shtick of the hillbilly yell on their television commercials), that ridiculous pudgy guy in the butterfly suit for Microsoft – Richard Bray, a Microsoft vp called him "fun, friendly, and approachable" – and the oversized primary-colored google logo, with its ever-changing holiday doodles, as another example of charming, child-like un-design.

These zippy little funster symbols are meant to offset the intimidating cast that information technology can conjure up for the digitally indifferent, and probably do a good job at that. The cheerful little google logo on my search toolbar certainly conjures up a pleasant enough response when I look at it . . . until recently, that is, with the news that google has agreed to take over censorship duties from the Chinese government by agreeing in its search results for Chinese users to block content that Beijing deems unacceptable, so that google can tap into the enormous potential that the Chinese market represents. What on a pop culture level can suggest fun, friendly, and approachable can obscure more complex and difficult issues.

A lot of folks say that google’s moves are not a very big deal (although, for a corporation that sold its image on the slogan of "do no evil" it is at least disconcerting) – Chinese users know that their government censors things, and thus what google is doing is par for the course, while still delivering them better service than they’ve had with indigenous search engines. There is also the fact that "everyone" is doing it – that is, all the big US info tech companies are involved one way or another with the Chinese government and "the Great Firewall," and so that’s just the business reality in today’s world . . . and Yahoo! reportedly has turned in two dissidents to the government, so what google is doing is not that bad, comparatively. Like many areas of multi-national trade, the politics and economics rarely reduce to simple dichotomies of good or bad (or, to take google’s own terms, of "evil" and "not evil").

The circulation of information is serious business. It may be easy to calculate profits and losses from the point of view of the dollar or the yuan (aka as the renminbi), but it is much harder to calculate profits and losses in terms of the ramifications of restricting the free flow of information. In the end, I guess it makes me uneasy when an American corporation chooses to restrict or monitor information at the behest of a non-democratic regime -- at the very least I figure a repressive government should have to devote its own time and resources to restricting liberty, rather than outsourcing the project to Americans. And crayon box-colored logos with holiday themed cartoon pictures don’t make that feeling go away. . . which means I’m in the market for a new search engine, whether it comes bundled with a cute and cuddly image or not. ( I only hope that it doesn't turn out that the penguin is just a decoy and it is Linux that is really responsible for global warming . . . )

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For more: wikipedia offers a tour of penguins in popular culture and imdb.com has viewer responses and more for March of the Penguins. On "fun" info tech images, some just don't work -- doesn't everyone hate Clippy, the Microsoft Office animated paperclip "helper"? He got the heave-ho in Windows XP. Further perspectives on google and China can be found in a PBS NewsHour interview with Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Beijing Bureau Chief for CNN and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard, and in an opinion piece entitled "Search Engine Diplomacy" by Adam L. Penenberg, assistant director of the business and economic reporting program at NYU's Department of Journalism.

January 26, 2006

This is one of those synchronicities between teaching and the information circulating around the web that I love so much. Jump-started by viewing R.E.M.’s video of their song "Man on the Moon" in class, we were talking about how the images of Newton and Darwin in the lyrics might resonate with questions of skepticism, of being kept off balance about judging whether something you are witnessing is real or not, about questions of evidence in coming to know the truth, and how one responds to others who question that truth.

We spent a fair amount of time looking at the question of skepticism about whether the U.S. landed a man on the moon, and what the dynamics might be of belief or unbelief about "what happened." And then when I log onto the web after class there’s this great piece on "7 Myths About the Challenger Shuttle Disaster," by James Oberg, who was a Mission Control operator and orbital designer at NASA and is now a space analyst for NBC. Oberg opens with a paragraph purporting to be an accurate recounting of the Challenger disaster events, and then does a fascinating job in a short amount of space in relating how the seven myths that inform our conventional wisdom about this historical episode emerged. As Oberg explains of this opening paragraph:

At least, that seems to be how many people remember it, in whole or in part. That’s how the story of the Challenger is often retold, in oral tradition and broadcast news, in public speeches and in private conversations and all around the Internet. But spaceflight historians believe that each element of the opening paragraph is factually untrue or at best extremely dubious. They are myths, undeserving of popular belief and unworthy of being repeated at every anniversary of the disaster.

Most poignant to me is the assumption that the astronauts died immediately. Oberg states that "Official NASA commemorations of ‘Challenger’s 73-second flight’ subtly deflect attention from what was happen[ing] in the almost three minutes of flight (and life) remaining AFTER the breakup." I was also intrigued by his explanation of how there was no "explosion," although probably most of us would use that word and feel certain of the evidence of our own eyes.

Reaching into divergent memories of "what happened" with Challenger has the potential to reveal a great deal about ideas about science and culture, as Oberg demonstrates. I’m glad he chose the word "myth," even though he probably means it to be a synonym for lie or falsehood. There are also other understandings of myths – that they are deeply resonant stories that explain our deepest questions about the world around us (even when not deemed to be 'accurate') – and these 7 mythic elaborations of the Challenger event can also be thought of in this way (it's interesting that 7 itself is a mythic number!). Richard Slotkin, in Gunfighter Nation, has an interesting take on the nature of myths: he describes them as "stories drawn from a society's history that have acquired through persistent usage the power of symbolizing that society's ideology and of dramatizing its moral consciousness – with all the complexities and contradictions that consciousness may contain." Thinking not only about why these seven points deviate from a more realistic account of the event, but what they themselves signify as symbolic evocations of the complexities and contradictions of our society’s ideology and moral consciousness about science and technology would be very revealing.

For more: The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science at Case Western University has a thought-provoking presentation on "Roger Boisjoly and the Challenger Disaster" (Boisjoly was a Morton Thiokol engineer who argued against launching the Challenger under the prevailing temperature conditions).

If you step into the way-back machine, you’ll discover there was a moon hoax of 1835, when the New York Sun published pictures of what it claimed to be an inhabited moon, as discovered by Sir John Herschel through the telescope.

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Image: The cover image from The First Lunar Landing as Told by the Astronauts: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/ap11ann/FirstLunarLanding/cover.html